Essential Email Hosting Terms Every Professional Know

There are some important email hosting terms every corporate email portal administrator or professional should know in order to help them perform optimally.  Here they are:

Alias

Simply put, an email alias is a forwarding address. It enables you to create additional names for an email account.

By doing this, you can have alternative email addresses without the need to create another email account. Emails sent to your alias will be forwarded to your primary email account.

For example, if your primary email is john@xyz.com, you can create the following aliases johndoe@xyz.com and john.d@xyz.com. Emails sent to johndoe@xyz.com and john.d@xyz.com will be forwarded to john@xyz.com.

It is important to note that emails cannot be sent from an alias.

Catch-All Email

A Catch-All email is an email address used to receive emails sent to invalid, misspelt, or non-existing email addresses on an organisation’s domain.

For example, many people expect websites to have an “info@” email address, for example, info@xyz.com. Many organisations don’t create an “info@” because it has been spammed to death.

Assuming an organisation doesn’t have such email address on their domain, when people send emails to it, instead of the email bouncing back, it will be received in the catch-all email address.

A catch-all email address can be anything@yourdomain.com.

A catch-all email address helps host email administrators identify common mistakes in spelling of email addresses and probably change them to email addresses that are not prone to misspelling. In addition, it helps ensure that important emails don’t fall through the cracks.

Custom Domain

A custom domain is a unique branded URL that identifies a particular website.  For example, xyzcompany.com is a custom domain.

Custom domain is usually used as the opposite of a non-branded domain such as xyzcompany.blogspot.com. When a custom domain is used in relationship to email hosting, it means you can get email addresses that end with your own domain, for example, john.doe@xyzcompany.com.

DKIM

Stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail.  It’s an email authentication system used to digitally sign all emails coming from a particular domain. It allows the receiver to authenticate that the email received from a certain domain was not altered during transmission. DKIM prevents the so-called man-in-the-middle attack.